PayPal

“As we were interviewing, certainly the early team and even the later team, We kept on selecting for entrepreneurs. We would ask, like, one of the stock questions I would ask was, so what are you going to do after PayPal? And the answer that I welcomed the most…”

“So if you know kind of the true base version of who we all are, as you watch one of these people go for something really big, like Elon Taking humanity to Mars, which is extraordinary. And yet, you know, he's a human being. Like, I've seen him sweaty and tired…”

“Smart deal to try and do, but they're clearly not willing to overpay as they see it.”

“I'm spending a lot of time with, you know, Shopify you know, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express you know, Intuit, the companies that actually deal with these small businesses and saying, how can we bring together the tools in order to make sure that th…”

“And people were like, did he really do that? And Keith, you know, Keith Rabolli was like, yeah, he would literally do that. He would, if you tried to bring up anything else besides your problem, he would just turn around and he would just walk away.”

“The Information has a big Stripe financial scoop that is worth discussing because. We have not discussed Stripe in a while and it is trying to buy PayPal.”

“So what they're doing for this PayPal takeover offer, which, you know, is, is just that, like, no sign that any deal is done, and I'm sure other bidders will emerge and whatever, but they're teaming up with Advent, which is a private equity firm,”

“They both process kind of 1.8 trillion dollars a year, right?”

“The board rejected it, right? And the fact that the board rejected it means to me that they're going to accept it.”

“So it's probably just a dance from 28 to 35. And then it gets parked with advent to while they figure out antitrust and capital issues.”

“Block, formerly known as Square, is Jack Dorsey's payment company, one of the few entrepreneurs to ever create two decacorns in our industry, and they're contributing seventeen billion in equity in the combined offer.”

“I think it's only growing seven percent a year, which is a lot on the base that, you know, it's grown to, it's a big base, but the product has become somewhat obsolete, and in a way, it's a legacy product.”

“What is the only kind of baby that Advent and Stripe and Block could have together? And I think there's one, which is you are creating a competitor to Visa and MasterCard.”

“I think that eBay and PayPal are probably the beginning of a wave of mega deals of call it flaccid, you know, digital businesses. That can be revived. With the blue chew of capital and the right operator. Again, I think that there's probably a big wave of this…”

“The other thing is this is probably not the final clearing price. I think the price is probably another 10 to 15% higher from here.”

“And I think they're doing about two trillion a year of annual transaction volume. I think PayPal is doing 1.7”

“This is the exact reason why if this had happened two years ago, this would have been the antitrust equivalent of a colorectal exam. I mean, you would not even get one step close to doing this deal two years ago.”

“Doing basically what everyone in your industry does, doing scammy affiliate marketing when it's basically part of your thing. I mean, startups cut corners, right? It's not, this isn't Delvesque, but everyone cuts a corner. When everyone in your industry is sli…”

“If you could make PayPal even run half as well as Stripe, that's probably worth double what it's currently worth.”

“The basic structure of the deal is as follows. Fifty three billion for all of PayPal. 60 dollars and 50 cents per share offered. 28% premium over yesterday's closing price. But it's a steep discount to last year's valuation. Fifty billion has been committed in…”

“Stripe is partnering with private equity firm Advent International for the deal. They have a lot of deal-making experience in fintech specifically. And I think they're going to go fifty-fifty on the equity portion, but then there's a whole bunch of bank financ…”

“The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.”

“People don't realize SpaceX was not originally a company. It was a philanthropic mission. He had Almost two hundred million dollars from their sale of PayPal. And his first plan was to just shoot a rocket to Mars. Have a little greenhouse on the surface of Mar…”

“Unlike many bad business books, his is very good because he's built multiple companies, but when he wrote that, he was primarily drawing on the experience of building PayPal, which I think was formative for both of us, and what he wrote rings true to those of …”

“There's not a PayPal group chat. Not, not that I'm invited to either. So if he's not invited, I'm not invited either.”

“Max basically hired all the technical talent in the organization. Peter pretty much hired everybody else. They used their network primarily, so it was very difficult to get a job at PayPal unless you had a first degree or second degree connection to the engine…”

“At PayPal, we had about 254 people in Mountain View when we were acquired. Of those people, depending on how strict you really want to be, it is considered one of the best talent-rich networks of all time in technology. There is between 12 to 17 barrels in t…”

“You know, my more important arc in this is I think you have to build a company on undiscovered talent. Like I don't think you really want to compete for the people that everybody else wants. Right. And, you know, I learned this at PayPal. Peter taught me this …”

“And he told us that PayPal back in the day, raised prices five times. In three years, because there's such stickiness. They knew their customers really couldn't do anything.”

“Running a startup is an oral tradition. There have been a couple of nucleating times in history where, like, a really remarkable group of people have kind of figured it out from scratch. Like, I think PayPal was like this, but almost always beyond that, it's l…”

“You go back and look at what, you know, Peter Thiel and Elon, Max Levchin, all these guys were doing, David Sachs, they actually had many similar ideas to Bitcoin. They were trying to create a decentralized form of money that could be permissionless global on …”

“It's like, this is the one chance for Stripe to sneak through becoming effectively a U.S. Monopoly on payments.”

“My spidey sense of why it won't happen is just the, it's the nature of the leaks have been like trial balloons galore.”

“And the result of that, by the way, very objectively is PayPal. Like over and over again, that company made all the wrong decisions because they cared more about today than 10 years from now. And guess what? It is now 10 years from now, and the company's in de…”

“He fired him, but he treated him like a human being. Okay. He vest fully vested all his stock, took nothing out of his pocket, thanked him for it and told him that was the way it was going to be.”

“He had, like, a bonus system for PayPal employees. If they lived within, like, a couple miles of the office, you'd give them more money.”

“At PayPal we had to change to, like, we, as you know, because you were close to us there, like, we had to change to a paid model because we're like, oh, look, we have exponentiating volume, which means exponentiating cost curve, which means despite having rais…”

“At PayPal, we had of the 254 employees we had in Mountain View when we went public to maybe three had any expertise in financial services at Square. If you included me, which is I'm certainly not a prototypical financial services guy of the first 300 employees…”

“The other thing that was going on at the time was that, you know, I think it was Google PayPal and eBay. We're all talking about their vulnerability reward programs, which was what we called a bug bounty program back in like, 2012, right?”

“I took computer science at Stanford and I actually, it was very theoretical, which I enjoyed as well. I think you should have some theory, but I actually learned a hell of a lot more from like working at PayPal and working around other kind of engineers and fo…”

“Rajeev was also one of the first investors in PayPal.”

“Max Levchin is a first rate technologist and a first rate business strategist. There's less than five of those people in the world.”

“You don't want to be the best in the world at what you do. You want to be the only one who does what you do. And so I think that's mostly people who are successful. They figure out how to frame themselves. So they're not just the best. They're the only.”

“I remember sitting in a management meeting at eBay after we got acquired and right after we got acquired and they hired some consulting firms, Bain actually, to analyze the threat posed by Google to commerce. And their conclusion as a management team and with …”

“He you know, he was in the three million dollar post-money valuation round of Airbnb. He was the first dollar into Pinterest. He was early in Uber. He was early in PayPal.”

“Well, the A players at PayPal, who would be massively successful there, are not the same players as the A players at Apple, who can be massively, so you actually get these areas of coherence and cultural identity”

“So perplexity announced a partnership with PayPal. We've talked about this a lot and perplexity has done a lot with shopping and they'll let you ask a question. They'll show you a bunch of potential results. Now with PayPal, you can check out directly, handle …”

“He put his PayPal founder shares in a Roth IRA. Sold those for about twenty seven million dollars, then used this as a supercharged investment account to where it is today, where he has five billion dollars in his Roth.”

“The unit economics are really tough in financing e-commerce, and that's the reason these interest rates, like even you look at PayPal, like PayPal's got oodles of money. They're sitting on bags and bags, a war chest of money that they could be empowering. All …”

“And if all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen.”

“We had, I think, like, over 11 VC firms offer to invest. We actually chose to do the round with no VC firms. It was all angels, so we raised from, you know, twenty-plus CEOs and founders. It was, you know, the CEOs and founders of, you know, PayPal and Stripe …”

“The largest Internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? One point by a billion. And So this was like two X. And then you had. This is amazing. YouTube. YouTube was also 1.6 billion or something like that. Yeah. Also the same year with Google. So this was…”

“Olo, PayPal offered to buy the business. PayPal came in and made a hundred million dollar offer, and literally, it was like Christmas, and that, that deal fell through. Noah and I were very disappointed. I remember, like, the 29th of December, they offered to …”

“It took him longer to write the founder's book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to eBay.”

“PayPal, they threatened to take away 2500 dollars out of your account if you were caught inciting hatred or misinformation, which they were defining as they wanted. This actually red pilled the former PayPal CEO, David Marcus, who ended up speaking out on the …”

“And if you decided not to invest in that time, you would have missed out on Google, Salesforce, PayPal, Zappos, OpenTable. There are a lot of great companies that were still founded during that time, and Paying market prices for those investments would have be…”

“What you're looking at is one six five University Avenue, also known as the Lucky Office, also known as the Karma Building. You might recognize a little better here when you see one of the companies that was started here. So Google was started here. Before Goo…”

“Like I could have been running something that I think PayPal's peak market cap is like a hundred billion could easily be a trillion if they were still there.”

“It was 20 founders, CEOs that You know, did that seed round. It was the founders of PayPal and Instagram and Mint and Eventbrite and Stripe and Nest and a whole bunch of really incredible businesses Box and Dropbox.”

“I got pitched early in stripe and square, and I Didn't do the investments because I knew how hard payments was from PayPal.”